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Panick Stricken
Hi everyone. I hope you are well.
I have been shooting my first scenes for my Honours Project. The scenes are shot indoors at my house. I shot them yesterday and although they looked fine on preview screen they were terrible when viewed on computer. That was time I could ill afford to waste. I pondered all last night and decided I would reshoot the scenes. This time I thought I would use auto iso on every scene. every scene I would custom white balance and for good measure I would also film same scene again with auto white balance. I shout at 24 fps and 1/50 and standard picture style. Im a complete novice although I have researched the topic until the cows came home. Having looked at the scenes from today on computer they are slightly better but are very very noisey. I shot with a flat picture style (sharpness,contrast,saturation and colour tone all set to ‘0’). I am very disappointed with the results. If the video is salvageable at all I know nothing about fixing it. Im that desperate im thinking of turning them black and white.
The camera is a cannon 700d borrowed from my uni. filming was roughly around noon uk time and the only light used was natural light filtering in through windows. I have included a still from the footage.
Thank you so much for reading this.
Teddy -
3 Replies
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Your picture profile and camera settings are not part of the issue, in my opinion. Rather, I suspect this has to do more with the other two “legs” of the exposure triangle (shutter speed being the third):
* ISO
* Aperture
both of which impact the amount of light hitting the sensor or the sensitivity of the camera to that light in the case of ISO. Noisy footage usually means that the camera is trying hard to bring out detail in the shadows and is having difficulty – a well exposed image usually doesn’t have noise. Pushing your ISO up “too high” (what too high means varies from camera to camera) definitely can result in a noisy image. (BTW there are “de-noiser” plugins that many people report success with but they can be pricey – you will find some info on them if here on this forum if you do a search I am sure.)
Using auto ISO can be a solution but what if the camera selects a very high ISO because you’ve limited the aperture or have a very fast shutter speed (your shutter speed sounds perfect at 1/50 so don’t change that!)? Better to remain in full manual control of the exposure when difficult lighting decisions need to be made.
So my suggestion is to research what the “usable” ISO range actually is for your camera and then bringing in extra light when it is needed. I get the impression that you wanted a somewhat darker image and that’s where the technical meets the artistic – how to get that look without stressing out your camera. Hope you find some guidance in these thoughts.
Steve Crow
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if you’re going for image quality, you want a very low iso like 640 or less or you’ll have a lot of grain. Also, you probably need more light. You can reflect more light in there with bounce boards if you don’t have a lighting kit.
even if you remove the grain with neatvideo or ae’s remove grain, the low light will probably leave a pretty flat image. A good effect would be Ae’s exposure effect to counter this and individual levels to push the whites and blacks into a usual image. You’ll also need moving masks to lighten skin. It needs more light than white walls or looks very dull. Don’t use auto contrast!
Anytime you use auto w/b, the camera has to hunt for the right color, or if auto iso, the grain changes size. Full manual is the only safe bet. Make the iso as low as possible, then add more natural light.
If you have low light problems, the last thing you want is a super flat picture style. It will suck in even more flatness into your image because it requires more color/luma information. Still though, keep pre-sharpness down.
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Thank you very much for your time. Its great that people are willing to spend their own time helping others. I think i used 3.5 aperature and auto iso with custom wb. Was wanting to recreate a morning scene waking up from bed. When tried to use lights i was getting too much shadows so went without light. Although rubbish quality i used neat video to remove some noise. Very good plug in actually. After removing noise from the clips i might overlay a monochrome effect and hope the lecturers think it was intentional. Its only opening scenes. Thanks again.
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